Dear Mike,

It’s fall now. He’s got a new pair of And One Basketball shoes that are half baby blue suede, half white leather. And one size bigger than his last ones. He’s reading The Diary of Anne Frank in L.A. (language arts) and studying integers in Math. He and his friends are trying to plan a trip to Minneapolis in October to see the Vikings. It would be his birthday present. I guess you know he’s turning fourteen at the end of October.

This summer we went to L.A. (Los Angeles) and while we were there O. insisted that we go to Venice Beach. Specifically, to the Venice Beach basketball courts. They’re famous, he told us, movies are shot there, some of the Lakers play there once in a while, we have to go there. We’d be fools not to go there. We can’t not go there. Plus, he said, Jonathan Richman sings about Venice Beach. This summer he started loving the music of Jonathan Richman. When we drove all day through the sequoias to see the big one, general sherman, the biggest living thing in the world, he said he didn’t care, that he’d rather sit in the van and sing along to “I, Jonathan” one more time. So we went to Venice Beach.

At first we strolled along the boardwalk looking at different stuff, eating ice cream, talking, laughing, the usual. Then, suddenly, there were the courts right in front of us. And you could just feel this kind of tension come over O., like the way a dog gets when he sees a cat or a squirrel and just stops and stares and you know something’s going to happen. The happy, easy feeling of strolling along a boardwalk in the sunshine was gone and it felt like we’d just entered another zone or something. And O. says oh man, oh man, there they are. And then suddenly his voice kind of gets lower and his body kind of slumps around the shoulders to indicate that he’s one badass killer dude, unfortunately with an ice cream cone in his hand and with his mom and little sister standing next to him, and he says, in this low voice, uh, I’ll be over there, and jerks his head towards the courts, and starts walking away using the new L.A. killer dude walk that he’s been practicing. Can I have your ice cream, O.? G. yells after him, which at this moment is for him like being shot in the back with an AK-47 but because he’s such a sweet badass dude, he slowly turns around and holds out his cone to her before heading towards the courts.

Naturally, the rest of us can’t follow him. We know this. So we go and sit far away from the courts, on a wooden bench, and we watch. We can barely see him, he’s about an inch tall, but we can see enough to know, sort of, what’s going on. First of all he goes and sits on these bleachers that they have set up between the main court and one of the three other lesser courts. He’s smart enough to know that he’s not going to get to play on the main court. There’s a full game happening there already and these guys are really fucking good, and much older than O. But on the court beside the main one there are some other guys playing three on three and these are the guys O.’s watching. We figure that he thinks he can get to sub in one of these games. But he just sits there, he doesn’t make a move. He’s waiting.

And it’s really hot outside and finally G. says she wants to go to the beach, so C. takes her and I stay on the bench reading and watching O. from time to time. He’s still not moving, not playing, not doing anything but watching from the sidelines. Then C. and G. come back from the beach and C. sits down on the bench to watch, and G. and I go back to the beach. We’re there for a while, splashing around, digging in the sand, collecting seashells. Eventually we go back to the bench to find out what’s going on. Nothing, says C. He’s still sitting there. And I think to myself, he’s not going to do it. Then, suddenly, we see O. get up and walk over to one of the guys playing three on three. He’s saying something and the other guy says something, and then O. goes back and sits down. Shit! I say, they’re not going to let him play. But O. doesn’t leave the bleachers. He just sits there. The only difference is that now he’s taken off his baseball cap.

Behind us is the spot where those guys lift weights and swing from metal hoops and stuff, Muscle Beach, and C. and G. and I turn to watch these guys for a few minutes. Then we turn back to look at O. and right then, he makes his move. He gets up off the bleachers, walks over to the same guy as before, they say a few things, and then the guy sits back down where O. was and O. starts to play! He’s playing. He’s playing basketball at the Venice Beach Basketball Courts in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. His dream has come true.

And then he plays for what seems like forever, he plays for at least three hours, while the rest of us watch him in between doing beach things, totally in awe of the kid’s nerve and patience. He looks good out there on the court too, he’s younger but he’s just as good as some of the guys he’s playing with, and better than a few too. He’s the only white guy and he’s so white and with his shirt off and his long, skinny torso darting in and out, moving around, he looks like a ghost or a flash of lightning or something. Afterwards I offered to take a picture of him in front of the Venice Beach Courts sign and he said oh god, mom, no. Then G. asked him why he waited so long to ask the guy if he could play, what was he waiting for, Christmas? I don’t know, he said, smiling through all his sweat and whacking her over the head with his T-shirt, yeah, whatever. We kept walking, all of us silent as though we had just witnessed a miracle, and then O., forgetting that he was the top shit brother of the Boyz of Venice Beach, kind of arched his back, put his arms up in the air, sank to his knees right there on the asphalt and said oh man, this is the best day of my life!

See you in the photos, Mike.

X.

Hey Mimi –

I trudged down to the post office in the snow this evening, just before five, to find your birthday card: “Mon Cherie…a toast to the best day of the year! Your birthday.” It almost made me cry. So, it seemed appropriate to write to you on this, the last evening in my twenties.

I started to write to you earlier this month to tell you that Charles and I were expecting our third. Then I started bleeding and eventually miscarried. You know me well enough to know that death’s really never far from my thoughts, but usually it’s more like an airplane thing. You know how the whole time you’re flying you tell yourself all those stats, “It’s safer up here than in a car…it’s more likely I’d be hit by a bus…” But you still think about your mortality every three seconds and until you land you don’t quite breathe easy. If I thought about how everyone could zip out of my life like Dad and Brigid did (almost ten years ago now), I wouldn’t be able to function.

So I spent the last few months thinking about life, a new life in me. I kept thinking about how fifteen years ago I gave Misha a tarot deck for his fifth birthday. The first thing he did was turn over the three of cups, which has three women on it, and said, “These are your daughters.”

I guess I’ve talked about and believed in Misha’s prediction for so long that my brain had actually wrapped itself around the idea that this pregnancy would be my last. I had kind of settled on Hazel Francis being her name. It seemed surreal to be casting the last character of our little drama. Like, okay, all the members of the family are here. Charles and I are the matriarch and patriarch of this little life we’ve created.

What freaked me out was the thought that we’ve created little beings that will have to feel what it’s like to lose someone they love. And sometimes it was so surreal, like the sunlight would be coming through the window a certain way, a magical way, and I’d see the girls take that in and I’d realize they were making one of those memories that they’ll have forever. It could be thirty years from now and they might be anywhere and the sun will come through a window a certain way and they’ll feel that weird mixture of nostalgia and sadness and happiness all at once. And that’s what being alive is. But it’s so big, so huge and we were going to pass that on to yet another soul; that huge mess of experiences and emotions to navigate.

Then I was out Xmas shopping with my mom on a Saturday. I came home with a really stiff neck. We got the kids to bed and Charles and I sat in front of the fire watching TV. He rubbed my neck for a long time and when he was done I was crying, though I had no idea why. Really crying, really sad. I went in to pee before we went upstairs and I had started bleeding. I called my midwife, and she said it was a hopeful sign that I wasn’t cramping, and that I should keep her posted. But I bled all weekend and on Monday she explained that I would probably miscarry in a day or so. She said the fetus had probably been dead for over a week.

The good news was you only have to dilate to three cm (not the ten cm you need for labor). I was still a little shocked on Monday night when the cramps turned into contractions. Forty-five minutes of contractions and then such a bloody mess that I had to camp out in the bathroom until I birthed the little mass. It was a few inches long and I could make out the basic shape of the spine. Then it was over. I was so relieved not to be having contractions any more. I actually thought, “Well, at least I’ll be able to have wine on my thirtieth birthday.” Isn’t that sick? And then on Wednesday I was out Xmas shopping with Mom again. Nothing skipped a beat.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend Maria, from grade school. The night before Jamie and I tripped with her for her first time she took a shower before we went to bed. She came in afterwards and said, “That was my last shower before I trip.” Her mother was very religious and it made all of Maria’s events, all her choices, shimmer with an importance I didn’t have to reckon with. I can’t remember the last shower I had before I miscarried.

Since the miscarriage I’ve had the oddest flood of memories about Maria. When we were thirteen she spent the night at my house and we lied and said we were staying at a friend’s. We took a bus to Atlantic City via Camden. I still get shivers when I think of us, two silly white girls in Camden, at thirteen, by ourselves. We ended up spending the night with two losers in an abandoned shed outside one of the casinos. Earlier that night, I lost my virginity to loser # 1 on a toilet in the casino bathrooms. I remember lying and saying I had just finished my period because I had gotten blood on his white sweatshirt (because it was my first time) and I didn’t want him to think I was inexperienced. Maria got away with just giving loser # 2 a blow job. We got back into town at daybreak and went to Friendly’s to eat breakfast. The weird thing was, as we talked over breakfast, she seemed more changed by that blow job than I did by my own deflowering. Everything that changed her seemed so symbolic.

I think I must be craving a little of that purity that Maria seemed to embody. I know where to put the mythology that is me and Charles, I know what drugs and sex and travelling and death of loved ones did to me, and I can honestly say that nothing has altered my life more than Mazie and Clemmie’s births. But I’m at a loss to know what to feel right now. And that’s a little unusual for me. It’s rare that I actually make room for a random glitch. It seems belittling that it could have just been a misfire, a mathematical inevitability.

Charles and I noticed the lonely pregnancy test on the top of the bookcase the other night. We’d saved Mazie’s and Clem’s for their scrapbooks. I know that’s kind of gross, since it’s just a stick with my urine on it, but it heralded their births. With this one we really didn’t know what to do with it.

Last night I had a dream that we were all in Ireland. Charles and the girls were at a pub with some other family while I went to do some errands. I was driving up to a rotary. I think I had just bought groceries. I saw in the rear-view mirror that I had narrowly avoided being rear-ended by a big semi truck. Then I felt the impact and realized I hadn’t gauged right. The truck was going to plow right over me and I wasn’t going to make it. The last part of the dream I remember I was screaming Charles’s name with all that was in me. I woke up almost shaking and kind of slid over to Charles, spooned him, and cried myself back to sleep.

So that’s been my life lately. I’m fragile and fine. Snappy with the kids. Tense with Charles. Unsure if we should be using birth control while I get my body in a little better shape. And very aware that turning thirty tomorrow means that time is careening along and I hope I’m not too self-involved to notice the gloriousness around me. I love you Mimi. Thanks for writing. I’ll call you soon.

All my love,

Sharon.

Dear Johnny,

Two weeks ago I got a phone call from my mother. She was calling from a phone booth across the street from my apartment and said that she’d taken a bus up from Provincetown. She had some cheques that one of her Canadian friends had written her and she needed me to cash them.

When I let her in, she handed me a copy of The Making of Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein as a gift. The pages were stuck together as if it had been found in a box in the garbage. “I guess it’s kind of stupid because it’s a book about a movie,” she said. “But it’s still Frankenstein, right?” She had a tiny book about insects for Arizona.

I hadn’t seen my mother in about four years. The last time I saw her was by accident, when I ran into her at a house party in Richmond, Virginia. She had a Jean Cocteau book with her. She had underlined practically the whole book.

“It used to be a unique thing to have a pet rat,” my mom started rambling as she fell down onto my couch. “But now every punk on the corner has a rat on their shoulder. It’s like it used to be that if you saw someone with a shaved head, you knew they were cool. That you could like go and talk to them. But then everyone started shaving their heads, so you never know what’s up.”

She acted like I was rich. “Where did you get that necklace?” she asked me, staring with awe at this gold chain around my neck that had a pendant that said Heather. During the day she wrote letters to people who lived all over the states. They all said things like, “I miss you. I was thinking of maybe taking a break and coming to see you.”

My dad met my mom when she was nineteen. She had run away from home. She was sitting in a park with a small duffel bag of clothes, just being a hippie. My dad was twenty years older than her. He was a tough guy and wanted to take care of her. She left when I was six and has been drifting ever since, sleeping here and there.

Now she acted all excited that she and Arizona and I were all together in my apartment, like this would be an ideal living arrangement. She started saying things to make us sound like a team: “Aren’t we just like in the Grapes of Wrath? Three generations under the same roof.” She told me that Andy Warhol’s mother came to live with him after he made it.

She heard from someone at a bar that welfare was easy to get here as long as you have an address. So she got me to look for a place for her last week.

When I was a kid, my mom used to wear leather jackets and leather pants and her hair was naturally black and way down her back. I used to think she was so wild looking. But last week, when we were walking down the street together, I thought she looked like a homeless person. She chewed on a toothbrush at the bus stop. It was warm outside and she was wearing this military coat with red stars stitched all over it. I knew she considered it her dress-up jacket.

The first room we looked at was small and dark. The walls had been painted years ago. The green had lost all its color. There were spiders in the sink. The bed was standing up against the wall. There was a hot plate. There was only one window. You could put a photograph on the wall. Really it could be any room, if you wanted to be optimistic.

“I could buy a second-hand typewriter and put it on the table. I’ll be just like George Orwell,” my mom said, turning to me.

I never see these rooming houses when I’m not with my mother. They’re invisible. Loose-leaf papers above the door handles announce that there are rooms for rent. My mother knows where they are. She knows where to find them. She knows where the food banks and coke dealers are a week after she moves to a city. We looked at four or five other rooms that day.

After the fifth room, we decided to get a drink. We went to an alcoholics’ bar, the kind where the windows to the outside are tinted, and it’s crowded even though it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. I bought her a pack of cigarettes. She asked the bartender if she could order a glass of arsenic.

“Look at that guy,” she said. There was this young guy with his hair just matting. He had striped pants and an undershirt. He was dressed like someone in Africa in cast-off North American clothes. He was just one day away from being a bum. But that day is a special place: you think you’ve gotten away with it. You think you’ve gotten away with just doing exactly what you please and feeling good. There’s a brief moment before cool things become depressing.

“Nick Cave always keeps a suitcase by the front door. Did you know that?” my mom said. She kept having to make these analogies for me so that I would think that everything was cool, so that I would still be impressed with her way of life.

Sometimes she would take us on trips when we were kids. We always stayed in motels on strangers’ credit cards. She said that we were like the Beatles because we made such a mess of the rooms we stayed in. She got me into black jackets, sunglasses, cigarette vending machines, and graffiti. She got me into thinking that poor people were cooler than rich people, that art and expression were the most important things in life, that it is enough to have personality, that personality is next to godliness.

“I should go and get my stuff at the bus station,” she said.

My mother saw the world. My sisters and I grew up, meanwhile, in little apartments in the poor areas of Montreal. She told me once a long time ago that she needed to be free to be an artist. I can’t imagine giving up Arizona because of the notebook of poems in my pocket.

My mother wasn’t going to take any of the rooms that we looked at. It was just a ritual. She was waiting for me to tell her she could move into my place permanently. She was carrying all her stuff, so she said she would just stay at the Brewery Mission. She said that there was a section just for women. She said she went a few days ago and the lady who worked there was very nice and the mission itself was clean. But don’t tell your father I’m staying there.

There was a small line of people shuffling into the door of the mission. They looked like immigrants from some very cold place where all anyone does is read poetry. The window was a one-way mirror. When I tried to look in, I could only see myself.

I bought this pair of leather boots at the Sally Ann today that are skinny and turn way up at the toes. They made me think of that Bob Dylan line, “Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells.” I thought my mother would love them. I called the mission when I got home but they said she wasn’t staying there any more. Now the boots are sitting by the front door with all the other shoes, until I see her again.

Love,

Heather

Hi,

My mind is even less clear than it was when I last saw you, at 9:37 a.m. Remember? I was lying down, asking you not to go to work because I couldn’t move? After that, and still in very much the same state of mild ungrounded fear, I drove my father to the airport, quite distracted and feeling as if every street was chosen for me already, like the car was on tracks, and that absolutely nothing in the world is any less ethereal than how I feel today, with my simple hangover. Every interaction I’ve had since has confirmed that. Am I carrying it with me? I can hardly describe it. My foot has been asleep the entire day.

In the car, Hal asked me if my vague inattention was due to my period, and it was so disconcerting I almost drove off the road. We’ve never lived together! Our protocol is specific, and that was a breach. He also asked me if Jerry was gay, because his handshake was floppy; I thought about that and laughed after I dropped him off. I had forgotten to laugh when he asked, I just answered crossly. I told him so many times that Michelle and Jerry have been together for years, and while I suppose it’s true you can be with a person of the opposite sex for a long time and still be of a different persuasion, I don’t think that’s the case there. It’s such a floppy thing anyway to me, being gay or not gay, or temporarily un-gay. That’s how I feel, personally; except with you it’s a very extended remix of un-gay. Do I show that with every handshake?

Another funny thing he said was that yesterday he was really angry at me for telling him that Douglas, his friend who lives down here by himself in a big, carpety house in the Valley, couldn’t come to Greely Thanksgiving. He thought I was “running a power trip.” But then he arrived as My Dad Hal, greeted by the many Greelys, and Jim, and Rich, and I guess he realized it’s not so easy to casually bring a friend, simply because the house was filled to capacity. As I drove he said, “Yes, dig it; I had a wonderful time and you were right.” I know that was hard for him to say, and I savored that for a moment.

I think his flippant attitude towards party hosts is a combination of being raised in a big, wealthy family in Texas in the ’50′s and being what he is now, a hermetic cab driver who rarely has a domestic interaction. All things not of the hotel/bachelor lifestyle are foreign to him, including, I suspect, all men that live in houses (except Douglas, because he lives alone and drinks himself silly every night. Last I saw him, he was under house arrest for several DUI’s. Definitely macho. He plays Go well, takes Jim Beam straight, and makes cutting remarks).

After dinner, Hal saw the Simpsons for the first time and his world was rocked. He really likes you, he rocked back and forth a bit when he said it was good meeting you, and he said you were “good company.”

I can’t wait to see you in five hours. We’ll drive around, looking for records, go downtown, take a walk. I love you.

oxxoa

Dear Dad,

So Mom got married yesterday. It was in a park, amid some lurid autumn trees. The ceremony was performed with the river and the mountains in the background, and the whole affair was small, and nice, and stress-free. Unforced.

For the week leading up to it I was in a lousy mood. I was having trouble being any good at anything, and it all seemed glum. I couldn’t be bothered to prepare for the wedding (usually, if an event is coming up, with family or people I haven’t seen in a while, I try to gather up some material beforehand: bits of biography for the what’ve-you-been-up-tos, jokes, etc., but at Mom’s wedding I might as well have walked in, in a rented tuxedo, by mistake). Waking up yesterday I did something that happens now and again when things just aren’t going well: I opened my eyes and said, “Not this again.”

Of course it had something to do with seeing my brother. We hadn’t spoken since the disaster last December, the unpleasantness at a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I’d been in the midst of some serious money trouble, and I spent two hours unloading on a dumbstruck table of relatives – upstanding businesspeople all – my opinion that everything they liked was garbage, and generally being a real charmer. I didn’t know how bad it was until the next morning, when my brother called with accusations and threats, which you remember bloomed into the row that cancelled Christmas. That it happened stings; the pure gracelessness with which I dealt with it stings more.

On the way to the wedding, I rode beside my brother in the back seat of our uncle’s ludicrous German lifestyle signifier, with a thrumming hangover, feeling conspicuously dateless, sweating in a rented tuxedo, talking too much. Somewhere near the Oak Street bridge I began sharing my thoughts on why I don’t like weddings. I’m all for people declaring official partnership, in the eyes of the law or whatever, but this deal where the validity of the union is measured by the lavishness of the party and the carats of the diamond and the vintage of the champagne is insane. Whenever I participate in a wedding I’m usually deathly afraid of fucking up someone’s big day; I realized, almost too late, that one pretty good way to do that would be to drone on and on about the wedding industry.

It was warm and threatening rain all day, and so humid. Perfect weather for maximum hothouse effect in a polyblend tux. I wandered about beforehand, sweating, feeling vaguely ridiculous, trying to remember the names of old neighbours as they pumped my hand. Grinning people asked what was going on with me, and I kept drawing a blank. I had a courteous strategy discussion with dear brother on guest arrangement, speech timing, and limousine doors.

The dapper groom, sprightly at sixty-five, was ready to go. I like him, despite the accent (which, I believe, has gotten a little stronger each year since he arrived as a young man from England), and his habit of taking half an hour to tell stories really only deserving a minute or two.

When the limo arrived, and the first round of pictures was complete, we escorted Mom to her place. The guests were arranged, and we assembled in a row on the riverbank. It seemed like everyone there was either videotaping or photographing. Whenever I see these sort of pictures after the fact, I can remember smiling, trying to look genuinely happy to be there, but I’m always wearing this expression of sort of bemused disappointment. Through the ceremony I stood, not knowing where to let my eyes fall, shifting weight from foot to foot, wondering if I should clasp my hands in front of my genitals or behind my back.

And then I don’t know where it came from, but something lurched inside me, my head cleared, and I stopped thinking about myself.

I looked at all the people facing us, sort of a map of my early life – grinning, sniffling – and I had one of those grainy, super-8, life flashing before your eyes movies scroll by as I watched Mom, who looked so happy, get married for a second time. I saw her mother, making Mom pay her entire life for being conceived out of wedlock, that cruel, bitter old grandmother of mine who called her cheap and common and made her raise her sisters and brother, and who seemed to be looming everywhere in her life until she died; I saw the tall, dorky, uncertain teenager who married the first person she slept with (sorry Dad), and found herself with two demanding boys and a volatile husband with a chip on his shoulder (sorry Dad) in her early twenties; I thought of the fights you used to have that seemed to go on forever, both of you stressed out from work and the mortgage and trying to live the life you thought you were supposed to live.

The ceremony was over and hands were being shaken and I was hugging Mom, and we were looking at each other and crying. My mother, almost sixty years old, having what I was too dense to recognize until that moment: a day that was just for her.

Traffic was held back with a huge ribbon of white chiffon as we proceeded along the road to the reception. Everyone was blowing bubbles – rice is bad for the birds, I learned – and laughing or dealing with snotty tears. The dapper groom’s granddaughters, three little fountains of curly hair in matching dresses, were darting around with flower baskets. I felt oddly unselfconscious and giddy.

Later on we had an evening like the ones I remember best from childhood, with aunts and uncles and cousins getting loud and telling jokes and singing. The guitars even came out, and Mom’s brother played some of the Bob Dylan and Van Morrison songs he used to. At one point toward the end of the evening I was full of scotch and sort of aimlessly attempting a Foo Fighters song on a guitar. I looked up and saw my brother, playing air drums.

Love,

Dean

T–

I wish you could have been there. Lori’s 30th was the best party I’ve been to in years, possibly ever – yes even topping the dance party we threw her in the Rec. center with the silver tinsel curtain and her seizure and Lori stretched out on her back clutching a potato chip near the food table for half the night. You know how people look at me like they feel sorry for me when I say I don’t like parties? I’ve decided that it isn’t true. I am not a cynic. I do like parties – but only retarded ones.

You’ll be happy to hear that this year Lori’s annual birthday seizure was a no-show. Instead, for excitement, we had mean geese, bubbles, those bouncy balloon balls you slide over your wrist and punch, and that giddy-over-nothing feeling that some retarded people get and spread around like laughing gas. It’s great. All you have to do is say the word “party,” and you’re having one.

I drove in to Hammond and we went to the town park and laid down bedsheets and set up picnic tables out by the fake lake. Mom wanted to find out if that little train that used to chug around the baseball field was running again, and it turns out the new mayor did fix it, but they only crank it up for Christmas and special occasions – which to him a retarded party is not.

The weather was beautiful, custom-ordered, not Louisiana weather at all – one of those blue wispy cool Berkeley days that we only get here by fluke. Before the party, Mom was loading the Styrofoam chest of iced Cokes into the back of her car.

“Can you believe Lori’s turning 30?” I said, excited.

“Can you believe I’ve put up with her that long?” she answered. And I thought to myself, well, no.

Two of the ladies’ group homes where Mom sometimes gives shots came so they would have a Saturday outing that didn’t have anything to do with bowling or the mall. Whenever any of them see Mom, they start moaning and groaning, lifting their shirts to show her half-assed bruises. So sure enough, first thing, they’re barely out of their vans, and one woman with a smallish head bum-rushed Mom.

“Miss Liz, look at my feet! You want to see my foot now already?”

“Your feet are fine,” Mom said. “Go sit down and let Tucker get you a hot dog.”

Yes, Tucker manned the grill – bless his vegetarian heart. He did Tofu Pups and regular hot dogs and Mom let all the ladies have soda, even the ones whose Meal Plans said not to. As for the birthday girl herself (excuse me, the birthday woman – let us not forget to be “age appropriate” even and especially when she is not), Lori had a fresh short and ugly Sheena Easton hairdo that they give at Supercuts around here and she wore her glue-on glitter earrings. (But you’ll be happy to know I put my foot down about the Macarena T-shirt and made her change it – I might burn it one day soon. Mom still doesn’t understand what about it I don’t find “cute” in the least.) And the haircut, well what can you do? I know the stylists want to improve Lori, but come on. Is putting on the glitz ever really an improvement? Lori is chubby, she is loud, she is cross-eyed and silly and sometimes cruel to animals. She is not Glam. She will never be in Manhattan Transfer.

She is also greedy as ever, but I policed her, so she wasn’t able to hunk her fingers ahead of time into her cake. I bought her flowers and stole her a pink balloon from a car lot on my way out of New Orleans, but she didn’t notice either of them. So not much has changed since you left. See there is something you can count on.

As I said, Lori didn’t fall out on the ground, but beyond that I can’t say that she had “fun” exactly. Mom had fun, I had fun, the ladies and the workers from the group homes and Tucker and Buster had fun. Even the geese who chased some of the ladies and bit Lori’s finger as she was feeding them bread crumbs swarmed our picnic in a flappy happy chaos.

But Lori sat at her picnic table grouchy the whole time and kept saying, “I’m gonna spend the night with Cheryl two week?” She had her broken record turned way up. I tried to get her to draw with the sidewalk chalk and even the autistic lady who keeps her lips pressed tight together scrawled her initials on the ground in green, but not Lori. No go. Lori ate; she presided, grudgingly. Lori swigged her root beer, opened presents she didn’t look at before going on to the next, cast a tired eye here and there. Other than that she just kind of antsed around on her bench looking for me, croaking “Cher-ra, cher-ra, two week, two week?” But maybe she was with us inside that thick skull somewhere, watching us out of the corner of her brain.

Wait, I take that back. Lori did participate some. She let me paint her fingernails – but I think only because I was doing everyone else’s. And also because for ten fingers I was her captive. She kept putting her wet-polish hand under my chin to pull my face closer to hers so she could drill me with her eyes and bark, “Two week, two week?”

Also I think Lori may have had fun the night before when Mom told her that the next day was her birthday. She woke up early looking forward to it. And I heard that the next day she was excited about it again and talked it up big at the Workshop. So it seems Lori enjoyed her birthday before and afterwards instead of when it was going on. I know what you’re gonna say: Lori you got to learn to live in the moment, man…dude….

You know who lives in the moment? Who inhabits the moment more than you or I or your meditation-head friends could ever hope to? Carly Sue. (Page-boy haircut, Down’s Syndrome, cute, turning a little blue from her heart lately, family won’t come see her – I think you remember her.) I brought the Sly and the Family Stone Greatest Hits CD for the picnic and Carly Sue whose blood barely circulates danced for over an hour straight! We did the bump. The hold your nose like a Frankie and Annette movie and swim. Then she ground out all this nasty stuff she must have learned on TV at her group home while her House Mother yelled, “Go Car-lee! Go Car-lee!”

After Carly wore me out, Mom was up. The aides shook their heads no, like they didn’t get paid for dancing outside during the day, and Tucker wouldn’t either, said he can’t. But Mom (who, as you know, does a mean Jitterbug) joined in our tinny boombox dance out under the oaks.

Unfortunately though, when solo “modern” dancing, Mom can get a little weird. Like for one thing she decided to make it educational.

“Comb your hair,” Mom called, pantomiming it, bending her knees in time to Everybody Is a Star.

And Carly Sue would follow her, air-hairbrushing, plus adding an extra ass shake.

“Wash your face, wash your face,” Mom sang, scrubbing her face with an imaginary washcloth – and Carly did.

“Brush your teeth,” I hollered, exhausted on my blanket, with somebody’s sticky hands in my hair. “Use your mouthwash!”

So Tanio, there you have it. Super party, sucky society. Was Lori there with us at all, really, as she ripped open gift after gift and threw them on the table without really looking at them? I like to think so. As much or as little as she has been for the past thirty years.

And now I need to go clean my compost of a kitchen but first a word to our sponsors: LORI MADE IT TO THIRTY! To her obstetrician who left the delivery room in a shamed hurry and later told Mom to ship Lori to the State School before she ruined all our lives and that Lori probably wouldn’t live that long anyway – you’re DEAD and Lori’s not! Shame on you. To all the people who give us dirty looks like they’re going to choke on their angel hair when I take Lori with me to a coffee house or a cafe – we have fun and you don’t! We are not scared to be ugly. We painted our fingernails orange and got it on our skin and liked it that way! To the hushed, prim Catholics who don’t like their Amens loud and garbled and sung from the belly – up yours! If there’s a Heaven, Lori’s there and you’re not. To all the sweet black church ladies who have welcomed us into their church and their songs and their arms and their god, thank you, thank you – but please stop making Lori color those Jesus pictures and taping them to her bedroom door. She’s already saved.

To Lori, who talks to me when she’s watching Wheel of Fortune and giggles and curses me even when I’m not there, congratulations, birthday girl. Everyone had a happy birthday for you and we’ll do it again next year and next year. I have a petting zoo idea. To Tana, your number’s up, friend. Time to live in the moment. Reach deep into those Silicon Valley pockets and go buy a Flintstones puzzle with big pieces. Somebody’s still running out to meet the mailman.

See you soon,

Cheryl

Dear Friend Conners,

My Friend Conners is the way my Dear Son Donald Ross spoke of you when he wrote me the last letter he ever will write to me, said letter being dated “somewhere in France Aug 30th.” He was killed Sept 2nd, I believe the day you were wounded. You know I do not know what your name is but believe Donald mentioned it in his letter but I do not want to read the letter just now if I do I shall not be able to finish this letter to you. I am very sorry to know you are wounded then again if not dangerously so I am glad as you will be safe for awhile at least and now I am going to cry out a mother’s sore heart to you for some little news of my son’s death or at least something about his last days or hours on earth.

Ah if you only knew how I want to hear something about him you see he wrote me the Friday before he was killed and he said like this – my old friend Conners is Sargent and I am going in his company so do not be surprised if I get a stripe myself that is if I am lucky enough to stay here long enough to get one. And as I have nothing except the cable and a letter from a Chaplain by the name of Jackson who put another man’s name and number in the letter he wrote about my boy’s death so you see it had very little interest for me. So I just made up my mind I would appeal to you for news. Perhaps you can give me some details and if not get into connection with some of the boys who were near him when he fell and also try and have his little personal effects sent to me they are as nothing to anyone else but ah how precious they would be to me his Mother anything touched by his dear hands.

Ah Connors may you never have that longing to see anyone that I have to see my son for I am so lonely for him and have been waiting for so long and now ah now I must wait all in vain and I loved him so. Please do all you can in this for me and I shall give you a Mother’s blessing.

We are holding a Red Cross concert hear Monday night Oct. 28 and Kate went down to see if Frank Mallory would sing for us. Our Minister Rev. Le Bonnie got your address from Paddy Gale so I will get it from Mr. Bessner tomorrow and send this off to you hoping and praying that you will be able to write me some news any little thing about him even the fact that you spoke with him and how he looked etc. etc. would be a great source of comfort to me.

Now I will close and I do hope this awful long selfish letter will not tire you too much and that you will try to send me some little news.

Hoping this finds you as comfortable as can be and trusting you to do what you can for a poor lonesome mother. I will close with best wishes.

Mrs. Hugh Ross
Grafton Ontario Canada

Dear Golda,

Yesterday I decided to take my daughter to the amusement park. My dad was waiting for me to invite him along. At first I didn’t want to because he’s subject to yelling at me in public. He’ll tell me I’m anorexic while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. He’ll accuse me of being on heroin when I’m on my way to work. I told him if he wanted to come, to be downstairs in ten minutes.

My dad is seventy-two and works as the janitor in the three-building apartment complex I live in. He started having terrible back pains a few years ago. He’d fall off the bed reaching for his pills in the middle of the night and have to lie on the floor until morning. I moved into the complex with my six-year-old daughter, Arizona, to be near him. Except for squats, it’s the most dilapidated building in the city. Pieces of stone and bricks fall off the outside walls and the pipes leak. In the morning there’s always a puddle of water on the bathroom floor. The windows are impossible to open or wash. My dad says if he ever won the lottery, he would buy the building and burn it down.

When we got down to the courtyard he was waiting for us in a pin-striped suit jacket, his long white hair sticking up in all directions.

As we drove to the amusement park, Arizona waved at a man and a woman on a motorcycle.

“Everyone has to know what a free spirit you are?” my dad asked.

Halfway there, my dad made us stop at a garbage heap on the sidewalk. He shoved a kitchen table into the back seat. The rusted leg kept hitting me in the back of the head.

“It’s a perfect table for you,” he said.

“I already have a table.”

“Are you deliberately trying to starve yourself to death? At least think of your daughter.”

My dad was working in Virginia tearing down a railway line when he first met my mom, who was a hippie, twenty-five years younger than him. When she left him, my dad brought me and my two sisters back to Montreal with these southern accents. Things weren’t what we expected. The apartment was tiny and the kids in the neighborhood were mean. When we were living on the hippie commune in Virginia you could show up to school barefoot in your Halloween costume and nobody would think anything of it. In Montreal I showed up the first day of school with a red knit hat and overalls and it was all over for me. When we got home from school my dad showed us all the stuff he’d scored from garbage-picking. I got a blue stool with a seat as high as the kitchen table. I sang along to Abba on the radio as spaghetti sauce dripped onto my knees. That’s how he’s been furnishing his apartment ever since.

I had called the amusement park and the recording had said that senior citizens over sixty-four were allowed in for free. When we arrived and got in line at the ticket booth, my dad was nervous the whole time that I had heard wrong and that he was going to have to pay. Once the ticket-taker assured him he didn’t have to, he fell back into suave mode. He showed his ID and told her not to go looking up his name in the phone book to ask him out.

We walked by the rube tables. Every time any of the workers addressed him, my dad raised his middle finger to them. He treated them like drug dealers. He stood behind a man who was trying to throw balls into a tilted basket.

“That sucker’s hooked,” he said shaking his head.

My dad went up to a teenage vendor selling french fries to see if he could heat up the spring rolls he had brought along. The kid looked shell-shocked.

“What, your father own the amusement park?”

My dad’s good moods have always smacked of absurdity. For special occasions he used to buy a bottle of tonic water with left-over change. My sisters and I would sit with him on a park bench. We were each allowed to take one sip and then we had to pass the bottle on. If he thought we were taking too much, he would whack us on the back of the head. He used to leave us at the movie theatre and make us watch the film two times in a row so that he could have some time to himself. For Christmas we all received unsigned cheques for one hundred dollars.

Then once in a blue moon he would force us to do something cultural. One time he took us out and made us draw portraits of people and buildings. He would scream at us that we weren’t trying hard enough and to get more details down.

As we were walking around looking for new rides, my dad kept yelling at us to stop disappearing. When we went to the bathroom, he started yelling in to see if we were still there. He was all panicky that we were going to forget about him.

When we came out he was speaking to a Chinese punk kid. The kid’s spikes of hair were stuck up with what looked like toothpaste. He had a red ski vest and no shirt underneath. The kid had the largest cup of coke I had ever seen. He kept nodding, listening intently to my dad. My dad has always treated oddballs with a strange lack of prejudice. The tenants in our building sort of rely on my dad emotionally because of that quality. One guy came to my dad upset because he had done such a terrible job of cutting his own hair, and my dad had to shave his head with our dog clippers. Another tenant was running around the basement with an axe. The other tenants called my dad saying that they couldn’t do their laundry, so my father went down and chased the guy out with a drill. He refuses to have anyone evicted unless they don’t pay the rent.

“I’m not a social worker,” he says.

My dad used to walk around the apartment in his underwear and undershirt smoking skinny cherry cigars. Every time I coughed he told me I had tuberculosis. He never let me wear sunglasses because he said they make you go blind. He would pull up the blinds and blow a bugle to wake me and my sisters up. We had oatmeal and instant coffee every morning for breakfast. If we ate too slow, he would punish us by making us wear these wide bell bottoms to school. He once practically beat a guy unconscious for blowing smoke in my face at the bus stop. He threw a total of three televisions out the window during his fits of aggravation. But somehow he was always the good guy.

My daughter asked my dad if he wanted to go on a ride with her.

“Are you crazy?” he answered. “I’ll end up paralyzed. It’s just good to get away from the house. I could just drive a hundred miles away from it. I don’t care where to.”

My daughter and I took this ride that takes you way up into the sky on the wings of a very wobbly red butterfly. We asked the attendant three times if we were fastened in all right.

My father stood down below shouting instructions at us.

“Raise your arms! Yell, for God’s sake!”

“Why did we decide to commit suicide today?” my daughter asked.

When I was a kid, I had to do my homework on the fire escape because my dad would play the radio so loud that I couldn’t concentrate. He felt bad and built a little desk for me to sit on out there. The mathematical equations on the page were like seagulls.

On holidays we would go down to the canal and put cans on the ends of fishing lines. We never went very far for our vacations. My dad always had odd jobs until he slowed down and took the job managing this building right next to the train tracks. It was supposed to be jinxed because there had been a wedding party on the roof and someone had fallen off during the festivities.

That’s the building we live in now.

I’ve been thinking that amusement parks are like cities where you can jump off the roof, where kitchen chairs can turn upside down, where the subways fly off the tracks finally and everybody screams and laughs.

Love,

Heather

Dear Mike,

Well, summer’s almost over, and as usual odd things have been happening. Odd things happen here in the summer all the time, I don’t know why. What I do a lot these days is foul O. He decided that his main activity this summer would be playing basketball, and when his friends aren’t around I have to go across the street to the basketball court and foul him. Foul me, foul me, he says, and so I stand there and kind of shove him just when he’s about to make the shot. It’s kind of fun, although at first I wasn’t shoving him hard enough and then I was shoving him too hard. He’s taught me, in the meantime, how to foul properly, and has stopped laughing his head off when I do foul him. Now we’re serious. I foul him as he takes the shot and if he makes it he says “and one” and slaps my hand in the air. He’s there right now, shooting hoops across the street, with a couple of guys from the Cyclone, and trying not to get eaten alive by the goddamn mosquitoes that have invaded our city. Mosquitoes make him crazy, they drive him right out of his mind, but he refuses to wear repellent because he once read an article that said mosquito repellent can cause sterility in boys.

A couple of days ago, before school ended, a group of girls called him up while he was watching a movie called Three Kings, and for about half an hour G. and I heard him say, uh-huh, uh-huh, I guess, uh-huh, I dunno, uh-huh, and then the conversation was over. Who was that? G. asked him and he said I dunno. Girls? asked G. Uh-huh, he said. Girls that you like? she asked. I guess, he said. Last weekend he went to Toronto with my mom to see the Jays/Red Sox series and when he came home he gave G. a stuffed monkey that he had bought with his own money. Later, I told him that was a nice thing to do and he said well, he’d thought she was feeling a little down lately and he’d realized while being away that he loved her way more than he had originally thought. Wow, O., I said, that is so sweet. He said, Okay mom but can we not go overboard in the talking about it department?

Have you ever watched, from a distance, a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys yacking away, laughing, swearing, insulting each other, just basically shooting the shit, and then as you get closer to them, they clam right up and stare out in the distance like they’ve just had electroshock therapy? Once, the mother of one of O.’s friends and I talked about the last time we saw them cry. I really had to think about it. The last time, aside from the time he read a very sad book about someone he knew, and the time I really chewed him out for being rude to my aunt who had come all the way from B.C. to help take care of my mom after her surgery, was about a year ago at the end of grade seven. He came home from school and after an hour or two he mentioned that some kid had taken his slurpee away from him. Well, that sucks, I said (or words to that effect). And he nodded. Then, several hours later, in the car, he said that it was actually a bunch of guys, older than him, that had surrounded him and asked for money. Oh man, I said, this time more concerned. Then what? I asked. He told them he didn’t have any money. Then how’d you get that slurpee, one of the older guys asked. Well, O. said, that was all the money I had. Then give us your slurpee, the guy said. And by now they were all staring at him and then one of them knocked his slurpee out of his hand and it spilled all over him. Then what happened? I asked. He said one of the older guys told one of the kids his age to hit him, and the kid his age did. He what? I asked, ready to slit the guy’s throat from ear to ear. He hit me, said O. And that’s when he started crying and couldn’t stop. He just sat there in the car in the parking lot at the mall and cried and cried and I held him in my arms and stroked his hair like I’d done when he was three or four and every time I said that must have been really scary or I’m so sorry that happened to you, he’d cry even harder. He told me a little more, that the kid had knocked him down, that they’d all laughed at him, and then that one of the older guys said, okay leave him alone, and then they took off.

Well, I said odd things were happening here this summer as always. This is the latest: Your dad called here, right out of the blue, haven’t seen or talked to him since O. was an infant and you and I took that road trip when you barfed in that hotel bathtub, and he told us that he lived in Australia now but he was in town and would really like to see O. if O. would like to see him. (O. said no, not because he didn’t want to see him really, but because he just didn’t know why or what purpose it would serve.) And your dad totally understood and said if O. ever changes his mind, he’d be glad. He’d wait. I asked him if you were happy, and he said yes, very. That you live in Tokyo, that you’re a very successful chef, an executive chef, he said, in a hotel with five hundred and fifty rooms, and that you’re married to a wonderful Japanese woman and that you have a beautiful three-year-old daughter and that you’d probably never leave Tokyo. He said he’d send O. a picture of you and your wife and your daughter. He called her O.’s sister. He also said you were a lot like him, a wanderer, a bit of a loner, and that you often went off by yourself for stretches of time and didn’t talk about it much. But he sounded very proud of you, very protective, as though he was worried I’d slag you to bits or something. And of course I wouldn’t do that. Like O. says, what’s the point? You’re lucky, Mike, to have a father standing up for you. Have you introduced your famous penny wieners to the Japanese?

Sayonara,

X.

Hi Stacy –

Hey there, how’re things? We’re back from Maine, which was great, but we decided, following my therapist’s advice (which I think may have been misguided) that it would be better for me to be in New York City today – on July 25 – than up in Maine with my Dad.

Twenty-six years ago today my mother died. She was killed in a freakish car accident here in New York City, in the village, at the corner of Bleecker and Charles Streets. There is now a stop sign at the corner. There wasn’t twenty-six years ago. Two taxis came tearing down those streets – the drivers were named Aderinto and Baeradi, the most wonderfully musical names – and collided. One of the cabs spun around and slammed into my mother, who was standing with my brother at the corner. I think my brother and mom were waiting for a friend of hers – or maybe they were walking over to the friend’s house. Earlier in the day, she and my brother had gone bowling. My brother, then eleven, bowled a 168, breaking his previous record of 163. I’m not sure if he’s ever bowled higher than 168 since then. My father and I had gone to the New York Public Library for the day. He had research to do, and I tagged along. I was nine years old and spent most of the day reading a biography of the baseball pitcher Bob Gibson. The only thing I really remember is that Gibson seemed like an unusually angry man. And that he played with the Harlem Globetrotters for a time. And he may have come from Omaha, Nebraska.

Anyway. Back to the taxis. My brother says he can still remember watching the accident – it happened, as all accidents do, in slow-motion – and thinking that it was going to be cool, that they were going to collide. And then as he realized how close they were going to be, he jumped back, and reached for Mom, grabbed at her. (Our neighbor, a man with the name Yudell Kyler who, when I saw him last, about twelve summers ago, when I conspired with the gods to spend the month of July on Charles Street, had an unusually dark little hair growing out of the middle of his nose – Yudell Kyler saw the accident and used the word “clawed” to represent Timmy’s action in jumping back and reaching at the air for my mom.)

But, of course, one of the taxis slammed into Mom and threw her into the air and she landed on her head on a mailbox. I have never been particularly persistent in trying to conjure this part, what it looked like. But Timmy, who had run a few steps down Bleecker, came back, and the taxis had stopped, and a crowd gathered, and somebody put a pillow under Mom’s head, and somebody else got Timmy an ice cream cone, I don’t know what kind.

As Dad and I approached from the Sheridan Square subway station, we became aware of flashing lights and sirens. Some kind of commotion. As we got closer, Dad gripped my hand really tight, and I remember thinking that he was being silly. Then an old woman came up to us and said, “Mr. Davis, are these your wife’s pants? I think these are your wife’s pants.” And she had these folded-up black pants in her hands and I thought she was insane, but Dad started running down the block toward our house, pulling me.

Timmy was upstairs – in Yudell Kyler’s apartment. It strikes me now that I had never before been to his apartment, though he lived right upstairs from us, but at the time I do remember thinking what a soft and nice place he had. Timmy told us about the accident, which didn’t seem too serious to me, and Dad went off to the hospital, and another neighbor, Dick Meryman, a close family friend, came by and took us – walked us – back to his house on Horatio Street.

It was on the walk to Horatio Street that I think I must have first sensed that something serious was going on, because I remember I told my brother one of the worst lies I’ve ever told in my life. We were big Mets fans, all of us were, and as we walked along, silently, the three of us – me, Timmy, and Dick Meryman, stalwart family friend – I became seized with the idea that I had to cheer Timmy up. And so I told him, “Tom Seaver pitched a perfect game today.” As soon as I said it, I realized how transparent it was. There had only been about twelve perfect games in baseball history, what were the odds on something like that happening? And I thought, “Jesus, why didn’t I just make it a shutout?”

We must have been at the Merymans for a few hours. We ate dinner with their two daughters, and they served us hamburgers and baked beans, our favorite. And at some point during dinner, we turned on the TV. And there was a Mets game on. I was mortified. They hadn’t even played yet! I was too horrified to even say anything.

When Dick Meryman came in and said that our father was upstairs, was back from the hospital and wanted to see us, I was already feeling pretty bad. Timmy had said at dinner, “You know, Mommy could die,” and I thought, “No, she’ll come home with a big bandage on her head, but she’ll be fine, and she’ll tell funny stories about the whole thing.” But the feeling was not a good one as we walked up the stairs to the Merymans’ living room – they lived, and still do, in a very nice brownstone – and there was Dad with the news.

So now it’s twenty-six years later, and my therapist is telling me that it’s better to be in New York with these memories on this day than up in Maine under the clear blue sky. Well, my therapist has other reasons – I have other reasons – for not wanting me to be up in Maine on this particular day. But I’m not so sure. I’m awfully glad that we’re headed back there next week.

Because this memory – these memories – well, there’s no getting away from them in New York in the summer. Jane and I live in the Village, and this morning, I took Lily, our eleven-and-a-half-month-old girl, out for a walk. Men don’t get to be pregnant, but we do get to wear our children in those front carriers – mine’s a Baby Bjorn – and without a doubt the closest times I’ve had with Lily are on these early morning walks. So the sun’s just coming up – Lily is, euphemistically speaking, an early riser – and I’m walking down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square park. The city’s looking great, the Washington Arch is glowing proud, the doormen are nodding at the beautiful smiling baby on my belly as we go by. All is right with the world, and I’m reflecting on where I was twenty-six years ago, and how wonderful it is to have a daughter all these years later, what a redemptive kind of place this planet can be –

And then my heart has stopped beating because just as I’m stepping down off the curb of the Washington Mews – that little alley that empties onto Fifth Avenue between Eighth Street and the park – my new shoe, the left one, a fat little wallabee kind of thing with a sole that is way too thick for someone who has basically spent his whole life in sneakers, has buckled under me, turned over, and at the same time a little blue minivan has been pulling into the Mews, and I’m off-balance, and it all passes very quickly, and nothing happens, I should be clear about this – absolutely nothing happened, no one was ever in the remotest kind of danger, not Lily, not me, not the Aderinto Baeradi type who was driving the minivan…

But suddenly the world isn’t looking so good, and the park when we get there feels muggy and dirty, and the kid playground is sticky with old soda and Lily doesn’t really want to be in the swing and before long we’re leaving – retreating – from the park, and scurrying back to the comfort of our home. And at every light and stop sign – the Mews, do I have to tell you, has neither – I’m looking both ways and holding Lily tight as I cross and basically reminding myself of a teacher I had in the seventh grade who was the first and only agoraphobic I ever met, who when I saw her on Broadway one evening looked as if she’d seen a ghost.

So I think maybe it wasn’t the best decision to come home from Maine. Whatever problems I may have up there, I’m rarely assaulted by the kind of fear that routinely grips me in New York in the summer. Especially today.

Lying low till midnight,

Speak to you soon,

Nick